A Socio-psycholinguistic Approach To Language Contact And Language Change

Language is human beings' most important means of communication. Communication between different nations and cultures inevitably brings forth language contact.No living language is a closed system,which is by nature a continuous process of development.And inter-influences exist among languages - when speakers of different languages interact closely,it is typical for their languages to influence each other. Therefore,language contact,as an external motivation of language change,could lead to some language changes in pronunciation,word forms,syntax,and word meanings,and all such changes can be collectively termed contact-induced change.As to the contact between Chinese and English,it is usually believed to have begun since late Ming and early Qing Dynasties.After the First Opium War in 1840,China's door was forced to open to foreign trades and foreign cultures,which led to large-scale contact of the Chinese language with English.During and after the May 4th Movement of 1919,along with the growing intensity of language contact,English words and concepts were continuously borrowed into the Chinese language.The wider and more frequent contact of Chinese with English in the years following China's reform and opening up to the outside world which began in 1978 renders even greater changes in many aspects of the Chinese language.Since the 1990s,with the rapid development of the science and technology,internet has become the most important communication method and has profoundly affected people's use of language.Occurring as a new language variety used on the internet, netspeak has distinctive linguistic features in lexicon and syntax.Among these linguistic features of netspeak,some are induced by contact of Chinese with English called Chinese-English contact-induced netspeak,which is the focus of the present study.This research mainly focuses on the phenomena of language contact and language change between Chinese and English.It is designed to find out to what extent the English language has influenced the Chinese netspeak and try to explore the factors affecting these changes.So in this thesis,a number of expressions of Chinese-English induced netspeak at lexical and syntactic level are manifested and analyzed by reference to pre-contact and modern Chinese,to illustrate the changes in Chinese induced by English.Moreover, external factors which directly or indirectly affect such changes in netspeak will be explored both from the perspectives of social-linguistics and social psychology including intensity of contact,appearance and popularity of the internet,age and style,speech accommodation and attitude.The contents of the thesis fall into six chapters.Chapter One is an introduction to the present research,generally describing the object,the background and the significance of the thesis and the methodological issues.Chapter Two makes the relevant researches of the study on language contact,language change and netspeak.Chapter Three displays the theoretical framework - the integration of aspects of sociolinguistic and social psychological approaches for the analysis of the contact-induced change in netspeak. Chapter Four discusses the manifestations of contact-induced change in netspeak at the lexical and syntactic levels.The discussion concerns loanwords and abbreviation in lexicon of Chinese netspeak,code-mixing,change in normal function of word class,X +-ing,redundant words and change in word order in syntax of Chinese netspeak.Chapter Five analyzes the factors of contact-induced change from the perspectives of sociolinguistics and social psychology.Chapter Six summarizes the whole thesis and also discusses the implications,limitations and the possible direction of the future study. The study is of some theoretical and practical contributions.Firstly,the contribution to the linguistic theory lies in the application of integrating aspects of sociolinguistic and social psychological approaches to the contact-induced change.Secondly,as to the study of netspeak,the analysis of manifestations and factors of Chinese-English contact-induced netspeak makes contribution to the correct guidance and efficient control of Chinese netspeak from its causes.Thirdly,the practical value of this project lies in that what the thesis postulates is helpful to language planning and language policy in respect of language contact,language change and netspeak,and helpful to language teaching.